How to join related data in a RESTful Web API? - angularjs

This seems like a common situation so I've been searching for a question like this but I can't find it. I have built a RESTful Web API in ASP.NET. I have two related tables: Photos and PhotoGroups. The Photos table has a PhotoGroupID column that relates to the same column in PhotoGroups. In my AngularJS Single Page Application I have retrieved data from both tables using the standard RESTful queries. I am displaying a page with the Photos listed in a grid layout and one of the columns is the PhotoGroupID, numbers like 1, 2, 3, and 4. So how can I display the names of those groups instead of those numbers by joining the two queries in a RESTful fashion? I know how to add a new method in the Web API that gives me that joined data, but that doesn't seem natural in a RESTful sense. What is the common way to do this on the client side in AngularJS? Is there some kind of filter that joins the two tables, or some special syntax to bind a column to the PhotoGroup name column? I'm going to run into many cases like that when displaying information from related tables in the future and I want to do this the right way.

I started to solve this problem by adding a new method to my Web API that joined the Photos and PhotoGroups tables, but I quickly realized that I would be returning a collection of anonymous objects. To resolve that would require declaring a new class that contained the columns I wanted to return. That seems like it's getting much more complicated than the beauty and simplicity of REST.
So I pondered the alternatives in AngularJS and decided that I could write a custom filter that would convert the PhotoGroupID into a GroupName using the PhotoGroups JSON array that I already had in the controller scope. The code that implemented that solution is shown below. It's a little messy, but not very and it keeps the Web API nice and simple.
in Filter.js:
angular.module('PhotoFilters', []).filter('groupName', function ()
{
return function (input, scope)
{
var groupName = "Not Found";
angular.forEach(scope.PhotoGroups, function (group)
{
if (group.PhotoGroupID == input)
{
groupName = group.GroupName;
}
});
return groupName;
};
});
in my HTML table:
<td>{{ x.PhotoGroupID | groupName:this }}</td>

Related

SuiteCommerce Advanced - Show a custom record on the PDP

I am looking to create a feature whereby a User can download any available documents related to the item from a tab on the PDP.
So far I have created a custom record called Documentation (customrecord_documentation) containing the following fields:
Related item : custrecord_documentation_related_item
Type : custrecord_documentation_type
Document : custrecord_documentation_document
Description : custrecord_documentation_description
Related Item ID : custrecord_documentation_related_item_id
The functionality works fine on the backend of NetSuite where I can assign documents to an Inventory item. The stumbling block is trying to fetch the data to the front end of the SCA webstore.
Any help on the above would be much appreciated.
I've come at this a number of ways.
One way is to create a Suitelet that returns JSON of the document names and urls. The urls can be the real Netsuite urls or they can be the urls of your suitelet where you set up the suitelet to return the doc when accessed with action=doc&id=_docid_ query params.
Add a target <div id="relatedDocs"></div> to the item_details.tpl
In your ItemDetailsView's init_Plugins add
$.getJSON('app/site/hosting/scriptlet.nl...?action=availabledoc').
then(function(data){
var asHtml = format(data); //however you like
$("#relatedDocs").html(asHtml);
});
You can also go the whole module route. If you created a third party module DocsView then you would add DocsView as a child view to ItemDetailsView.
That's a little more involved so try the option above first to see if it fits your needs. The nice thing is you can just about ignore Backbone with this approach. You can make this a little more portable by using a service.ss instead of the suitelet. You can create your own ssp app for the function so you don't have to deal with SCAs url structure.
It's been a while, but you should be able to access the JSON data from within the related Backbone View class. From there, within the return context, output the value you're wanting to the PDP. Hopefully you're extending the original class and not overwriting / altering the core code :P.
The model associated with the PDP should hold all the JSON data you're looking for. Model.get('...') sort of syntax.
I'd recommend against Suitelets for this, as that's extra execution time, and is a bit slower.
I'm sure you know, but you need to set the documents to be available as public as well.
Hope this helps, thanks.

Returning data from API with joins

I have created a basic API using Laravel and am currently building the front end with Angular. Something I am struggling to decide on is how / where to cross reference data in the form of id's with their actual value.
A task object is currently returned from the API as the following:
{
"id":1,
"task_owner":7,
"client":2,
"campaign":17,
"created_by":1,
"title":"Finalise agenda for Call.",
"notes":null,
"viewed":0,
"priority":1,
"start_date":"2016-08-10",
"end_date":"2016-08-11",
"sub_tasks":[
{
"id":1,
"title":"my first subtask"
}
]
}
When displaying the task - I obviously want to show actual values, not ID's, for client, campaign, created_by etc. But I also need the id's to update those tables later, and for filters (ie show only tasks where client_id = 2).
So should I cross reference and send back these bits of data and include as part of my task object - or should I pull all user, client and campaign data in separate API calls first, and then cross reference on the front end?
The Eloquent framework is a powerful tool when querying. I would use the with() function to include whatever you want to include.
Task::with('task_owner', 'campaign', 'created_by')->get();
This is requiring of course that the relationships is correctly set up in the Task model

CakePHP 3.0: How Can I Organize These Model Functions

I am working on a CakePHP3 application that will be used to display information about which products our suppliers are currently offering.
** Different Vendors provide their product lists in different ways, CSV, JSON, or by way of a web scrape **
I have 2 models that I have created:
Vendors - This references a specific Vendor that we use.
VendorProducts - This references all the products that all of our vendors offer.
I would like to be able to call something like:
$vendor->getAvailableProducts()
and have it either get the CSV and parse it, grab the JSON, or scrape the suppliers website and use this to populate the VendorProducts table in the database with products from this supplier.
I understand the idea behind Fat Models and Skinny Controllers, however I'm having a bit of difficulty implementing this feature.
I would like to provide the following functionality.
The Vendor's getAvailableProducts() function can be called via the web interface AND/OR a cakephp shell script that could be run in a cron job.
As some functionality (like scraping the website) takes a considerable amount of time, I would like to be able to see the progress of this function in the view,
eg: X/Y Products Updated from {Supplier}.
This can be broken down into the following questions:
1. Which file should my "getAvailableProducts()" function go in?
2. As each $vendor has a unique updateProducts() function, how would the correct function be called from $vendor->getAvailableProducts()
// something like this?
public function getAvailableProducts() {
if($vendor->name == "SupplierA") {
getProductsFromSupplierA();
}
if($vendor->name == "SupplierB") {
getProductsFromSupplierB();
}
..., etc.
}
3. How can the progress of this function be returned to a View?
Don't use table classes for that create a new namespace within the model layer or in the app itself:
src/Vendor
src/Model/Vendor
Have a factory that constructs and returns you the Vendor classes:
$vendorA = VendorFactory::get('SupplierA');
$vendorB = VendorFactory::get('SupplierB');
Each vendor class must implement a method fetchProducts(), use an interface or an abstract base class for that.
The method should return a normalized array that can be used to turn the products in entities:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts());
You'll have a hard time determining the progress if there is no way to know the total amount of records. Which is likely when you scrape the website. Same issue applies when the API doesn't tell you the total amount of records per JSON data set. If you're able to get that total count somehow you can do this:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts([
'limit' => 50,
'offset' => 0
]);
And implement pagination for the vendor which you can then use to run over all the records in a while() loop in chunks of X records. If you trigger that via shell you can create a "job" for that and update the progress after each chunk. There are multiple existing solutions for this kind of task already out there. Finally use Comet or Websockets to get the status updated on your website. Or the old way: Trigger an AJAX request every X seconds to check the status.
There is a lot more that could be said, but this is actually already a very broad question, there is very likely not enough detail to cover all cases. Also it might be possible (I'm pretty sure) there are different ways to solve this.

Pyrocms Getting Values at front end

I am new to pyrocms.
How can I get database values on pages of pyrocms. In website of pyrocms I had created a listing page now I want to display database values from pyro database table.
I got your question, you want to create a listing on your front-end page for some database table values which you want to access through your custom module controller. there are many ways to get these values but the simplest way is to use ajax. you already have Jquery added in pyrocms so you can simply make a call to your controller method in ajax and get your required output as HTML and display it in the div element on your page.
$.ajax({
type:"POST",
url:"admin/your-controller-name/your-method-name",
success:function(html){
$('yourdiv').html(html);
}
})
In your controller create a method which get data from database and print it using echo create some listing table etc what you want.
i think you will get my point. if confuse then get back to me
You need to be more specific as PyroCMS has lots of components and each module (blogs, variables, widgets, file uploads etc.) uses specific tags you insert into the page. You may come across references to 'Lex' - that's the name of the parser used to display them.
Tags documentation
PyroCMS (the Professional edition) also has a feature called "Streams" which allows you to build custom databases and this in turn has it's own series of tags.

Filtering a collection vs. several collections in Backbone?

When is it appropriate to filter a collection vs. having several collections in Backbone?
For example, consider a music library app. It would have a view for displaying genres and another view for displaying the selected genre's music.
Would you rather make one huge collection with all the music and then filter it or several smaller ones?
Having just one collection would allow you add features for filtering by other attributes as well, but suppose you have tons of music: how do you prevent loading it all in when the application starts if the user if only going to need 1 genre?
I think the simplest approach is having a common unique Collection that, intelligently, fetch an already filtered by genre data from the server:
// code simplified and no tested
var SongsCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
model: Song,
url: function() {
return '/songs/' + this.genre;
},
initialize: function( opts ){
this.genre = opts.genre;
}
});
var mySongsCollection = new SongsCollection({ genre: "rock" });
mySongsCollection.fetch();
You have to make this Collection to re-fetch data from the server any time the User changes the selected genre:
mySongsCollection.genre = "punk";
mySongsCollection.fetch();
It's mostly a design choice, but my vote would be to choose a scheme that loosely reflects the database storing the collections.
If you're likely to be storing data in an SQL database, you will more likely than not have separate tables for songs and genres. You would probably connect them either via a genre_id column in the song table, or (if songs can have more than one genre) in terms of a separate song_genres join table. Consequently, you would probably want separate collections representing genres and the songs within them. In this case, backbone-relational might be very useful tool for helping keep them straight.
If you're storing information in any kind of relational/key-value/document store, it might make sense to simply store the genre with the song directly and filter accordingly. In this case, you might end up storing your document keys/queries in such a way that you could access songs either directly (e.g., via songs) or through the genre (e.g., genre:genre_id/songs). If this is the route you go, it may be more convenient to simply create a single huge collection of songs and plan to set up corresponding filters in both the application and database environment.

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